It’s old hat, of course, to reiterate that the first casualty in war is always the truth. In the 1991 Gulf War a clear decision was taken to keep journalists away from the front lines, in order to avoid embarrassing disclosures of atrocities and on-side ineptitude, which were partly to do with the tide of public opinion turning against the United States’s long-drawn-out adventure in Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed in a war that made no sense.
This time round, in another war that makes no sense, as far as anyone with half a brain can see, the opposite tactic has been used. So confident are George W Bush and Tony ‘Blah-Blah” Blair that their war is a just and dignified one, in spite of massive and articulate opposition from all over the world, including from inside the United Nations Security Council, that they have adopted a new tactic of having ’embedded” journalists riding along with the cavalry as it advances on Baghdad.
This means that you can see up the actual noses of American and British troops as they lumber onwards in their high-tech convoys — not generally a pretty sight. But at least it means that they can’t hide the truth about what goes on in this dirty war. Not the whole truth, in any case.
Watching the way in which the war is portrayed between CNN and the BBC is instructive indeed. CNN has abandoned all pretence at impartiality, while the BBC generally gives a much more rounded perspective on what is going on.
The BBC journalists tend to be more critical in their questioning of certain aspects of the morality of this whole enterprise, and the claims that come out of the mouths of the military — although, like their sister station CNN, they have fallen into the trap of making it seem like there is absolutely no other news of any interest going on across our vast and populous globe.
The ’embedded journalists” seem to be gung-ho about being part of this massive military apparatus. So are their anchors back home.
When Boy George (to distinguish him from his father, Ol’ Massa George, who used to be a friend of Saddam Hussein’s, then went after him in the first Gulf War) sent in the cruise missiles on day one, the media dutifully mouthed the Pentagon’s announcement that this was to be something called Operation Decapitation Strike. The idea was that the American missiles are so accurate they would find Saddam sleeping in his bed, along with the rest of the Iraqi leadership, and finish off the war in a few hours.
When the man himself popped up on TV a few hours later, defiantly reading from handwritten notes (unlike the Western heroes, who have scores of hacks pumping propaganda into autocue machines so that they can look as if they are on top of every detail of the campaign) CNN spent several hours asking itself: ‘Was that really Hussein, or was it a double who appeared on TV after the first cruise missiles landed on Baghdad?”
Saddam has at least 11 doubles, they went on to tell us. ‘This means that there always is that element of doubt among the Iraqi people about whether they are seeing their actual president or not.”
The United States and the United Kingdom, while continuing to pour scorn on the very idea of Saddam’s transparency, are themselves still refusing to publish the full list of the 46 countries that supposedly support this invasion, although Mongolia and the Solomon Islands are believed to figure prominently in this secret list.
What Mongolia and the Solomon Islands can actually contribute to this haywire turkey shoot in the blistering desert, and to what degree they can help fork out for the obscene $75-billion America’s boss-eyed president (himself, like Saddam, not exactly democratically elected) has said it will all cost at the end of the day, is hard to say.
Although who is to say that the day will ever end? What kind of infuriated resistance is this extraordinary invasion, unfolding in the full gaze of the world, going to engender further down the line? How long will ‘the Allies” be bogged down in reprisals whose origin they have not the slightest intention of trying to understand?
One of the advantages of this live actuality TV is that it was impossible to hide various mishaps in the first days of the invasion. British attack helicopters bumped into each other with boring regularity, killing all the good ol’ boys on board.
A US Patriot missile downed a Royal Air Force Tornado GR4, to much regret from the home side (called ‘the Allies” by the loyal media, to remind us of the heady days of World War II, Biggles, the Battle of Britain, and so on and so forth). ‘Until now,” said CNN, to put a better gloss on the disaster, ‘the Patriot missile has performed admirably.”
Well, it would. All true patriots always do the right thing.
What came as a surprise to the media was that Iraqis could be patriots too. This did not make sense. The ’embedded” hacks were presumably embedded first and foremost so that they could show the world live footage of Iraqi peasants running out to greet the forces of liberation. The fact that (at the time of writing at least) this had not happened was one of the ‘coalition’s” eggier, ongoing moments.
The advancing armies were met with fierce resistance. War machines were destroyed, helicopters downed, prisoners of war taken and paraded on TV.
Meanwhile the embedded media kept telling us of ‘the Iraqis using women and children as human shields”. We never saw this footage either.
Self-inflicted injuries were glossed over with friendly-sounding language. British correspondent Terry Lloyd was killed by ‘friendly fire” as he drove towards an American convoy. An Australian cameraman was one of five onside players killed in a dastardly car bomb attack in the north, and at least two American soldiers were killed in a friendly grenade attack by one of their own number at base camp in northern Kuwait. A British tank blew the turret off one of its own kind, killing two squaddies and injuring several others.
‘No one said there would be no casualties in this war,” said the American president, trying to look profound.
Well, at least the truth, for once, is not about to be the biggest casualty. Although they might decide to rethink this.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza